Alternatives to Hack and Slash Adventures: Mental Challenge 4, The Mind Switching Puzzle

Feel like your players can handle any puzzle or trap you throw at them? Have they been confidently walking through your dungeons and encounters, knowing nothing bad will happen to them? Want to be the most evil game master that ever lived? Then boy, do I have a problem for you! Warning: if your players are not mathematically inclined and do not like hard puzzles, do not throw this at them. If they are geeks/dorks/nerds/whatever word you like to describe people who get excited by solving difficult problems, then read on!

The Monty Hall Problem, but for your role playing game

This post is about incorporating what used to be a well known cultural phenomenon into your tabletop role playing game. It is really nice in the sense that it is easy to understand, challenges your players’ conceptions about how probability works, and causes them ignominious defeat at your table. Read on if interested!

Messing with Dice Mechanics: Critical Hits, Luck

This is the first post in a series about altering how the dice affect the outcomes in your roleplaying games. It is written with the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons as a framework, but you could port the idea fairly easily to other systems that use dice to resolve combats.

The first suggestion to altering the dice mechanics has to do with the critical hit that is common in most d20 systems. During combat, on a natural roll of 20 on a d20, the hit is automatic and depending on the system, the damage is altered in some way that usually increases the average outcome. I came across the following idea, although I can’t remember where from: every round, increase the critical threat range by 1. During round 1, a critical hit occurs on a 20. During round 2, a critical hit occurs on 19 or a 20. During round 3, a critical hit occurs on an 18, 19 or a 20. And so on.

It might not seem like much, but it dramatically changes the expected damage per round in a given combat, especially by round 3 and above. If players know that the longer they fight, the more dangerous that fight becomes, it changes their approach to combat. Combats can have a lot more tension, but at the same time they will resolve a lot faster – although not always to your players’ benefits.

However, if you use this mechanic all the time for an entire campaign, it might become stale, or have other unintended consequences.

It is our suggestion that you reserve this particular dice mechanic for special occasions. The party is facing down a mad priest of the god of war, and her first action is to ask the god to bless this battlefield with extra carnage. Or maybe a fairly malicious minor deity has his sights set on the group because they offended him in some way. He can’t do anything directly to the party, or summon anything nasty enough to hurt them, but he can bend fate a little when they are fighting occasionally. Or this only happens when the group is fighting a particular kind of creature. It is easy enough to flavour circumstances to your particular campaign.

Luck

Another type of dice mechanic that is handy is reflected in the “has the advantage” and “has the disadvantage” notion from D&D 5. Here, if you have the advantage, you roll the dice twice and take the better result. When you have the disadvantage, you roll the dice twice and take the worse result. This is a way of keeping the possible numbers that are generated by the dice the same while actually putting a fairly strong bias in to make results better, or worse, on average.

This mechanic can be substantially extended. In our gaming system there is a spell called Combat Luck that uses a version of this mechanic. When rolling damage while under the influence of combat luck, an additional damage die is rolled and the player may select which dice to use. The player does not get additional damage dice, but they get to pick the damage dice that serve their ends. Normally that would be the maximum damage possible, but if you are dueling someone that you do not actually want to hurt then you might select the lowest damage.

Another spell is Combat Resistance works in a similar manner, except that your opponent is given an added damage die and you are permitted to select the dice the opponent uses to compute damage. If Combat Luck and Combat Resistence are both in play then they cancel one another out. Versions of these spells that allow more than one additional die cancel out die-by-die.

The general idea, which can be applied in many places, is to allow additional dice to be rolled and then select the dice that are actually used, or, to permit multiple rolls choosing the best or worst for a given purpose. It might be that mystic combat arenas have versions of this mechanic imposed on them to make slaughter more likely, or to make training safer.

Give us a shout if you try this mechanic out and let us know how it goes! This is Andrew of Dan and Andrew’s.

Other Notions of Potions: Part I — Petrons.

This is the first in the series of posts on alternate forms of potions used by forms of life that are not normal material creatures. In the earlier post Dwellers in the Depths an object called a petron appeared. Petrons are the equivalent, for earth elemental creatures, of potions. An earth elemental simply absorbs a petron to get its effects. A material mage can trigger a petron with the spell trigger. The petron falls to dust and some effect usually accrues. Usually this results in the mage being petrified as the petron falls to dust. If the mage can make an appropriate saving throw, usually a roll against their mage skill (a magic save in other systems), they will gain some form of the effect of the petron.

Balloon animal spirits.

Creatures from the elemental plane of air are typically pretty robust. Self-willed whirlwinds, djinn, invisible stalkers, and others are menaces of the first order. This post is about a class of fragile elemental spirits that can be summoned from the plane of air. They have simple animal- or man-like shapes, they are fragile, falling at first damage. The point of departure into fun is that they look like animate balloon animals. Their “skin” is a magical field that encloses the airy substance that makes up their body. While they have very minor attacks — a very low value electrical attack, for example — when they are killed the gas within them is released with substantial to catastrophic effect. These creatures are summoned with an easier version of the spells used to summon air elementals and can be controlled with spells that compel the obedience of air elementals. These balloon animal spirits are likely to be entirely novel to your players — they are the intellectual children of the bubble men from the Arduin Grimore.

Fractional Necromancy

In several gaming systems the necromancer is a bit of a cardboard cutout enemy, a menace with the usual abilities. Lower degree necromancers can animate zombies and throw wounding spells. Higher degree necromancers can raise and command really dangerous undead and have the ability to hurl death spells. We have already explored some alternatives to standard necromancers in Dan and Andrews with our posts on white necromancers and gray necromancers. Today we head off in a different direction with some spells you can add to the catalogue of necromantic spells to make the death mages in your campaign a little more three dimensional.

Clouds, Pools, and other Elemental Manifestations

Minor elemental spirits are spirits that are also elementals. Typically they are odd enough that they require their own sort of summoning spell, but they also appear spontaneously when conditions are right. These spirits explain various traditional phenomena like colored mystical fogs and magical pools. There are several sorts of minor elemental spirits. Typically they create areas or material objects with special properties and they may be the animating force behind certain sorts of monsters.

Thrannos: the Slaver Empire

Many of the worlds that fell into the netherworld and became one of its planes were tricked or deceived into their fall. Thrannos is a strange place that joined the netherworld with eyes open because they liked the idea. The compact between the light and the netherlords requires consent, after a fashion, but Thrannos is one of the few worlds where the consent was wholehearted. This odd state of affairs follows from the very small number of sentient members of the Thrannian species there were. The resulting netherplane turned out to be quite valuable to the Lords of Szalinor and the dominant beings on Thrannos fit strangely well into the netherworld. They key fact is that the original Thrannians are psychic slavers and able to morph their own bodies and the bodies of others.

High level magic: Shapechange

This is the next in our series of posts about high level magic. Today we look at the shapechange spell. This spell permits the caster to change form into anything that is not undead, a celestial being, or a construct. The spell is problematic in a number of ways. It grants a substantial advantage to people that have poured over the monster lists, since they know what they might be able to shapechange into, but also some monsters are just too dangerous. A cockatrice can petrify opponents, a huge, ancient dragon, chosen well, has a horrifying breath weapon that the current opponent is vulnerable too, or an aerial servant is not only invisible, it can fly away at great speed. Handing a high level spellcaster most of the monster list might be too much. More recent releases of D&D limit the spell to some degree by forbidding transformation into something with a higher challenge rating, but a magic-user that can throw a 9th level spell has a pretty high rating.

What was I doing when…

When you are starting an adventure, or an encounter, there is sometimes a time-consuming debate about what the characters are up to when things start. In this edition of Dan and Andrew’s game place, we give you a table for rolling a plausible value for the answer to the question “what was I doing when…” Keep firmly in mind that these tables are necessarily a bit too generic and, if they spark an idea, go with it. Also feel free to change one encounter into an equivalent one. The gold coin might be a lost ring. The crazed nobleman flinging silver might be a torn bag on a galloping horse.